Mike Allred

All posts tagged Mike Allred

This week on View from the Gutters our topic work is FF, by Matt Fraction, Mike and Laura Allred, and Joe Quinones. Launched in 2012 as part of Marvel NOW, this series was part of a duology along with its companion series Fantastic Four, also written by Fraction and drawn by Mark Bagley. That series covers a year in which the Fantastic Four leave Earth on a family vacation through time and space. FF, meanwhile, covers events on Earth with the Four’s stand-ins—Ant-Man (Scott Lang), She-Hulk, Madame Medusa, and pop-idol Darla Deering—as they attempt to care for the gaggle of super-genius children known as the Future Foundation.

This is a light-hearted, fun, humorous series which is all about family. The Allreds’ art is, as always, fantastic (no pun intended), and the series is filled with easter eggs and references to the original 1960s Fantastic Four run.

ANNOUNCEMENT: We are trying an experiment this week with censoring profane language in our show. This is something that we have debated for some time internally, as it is something we have received complaints about in the past, and we are interested in your feedback.

In our recommendation section our hosts nominated Infinite Kung-Fu, Runaways, The Sixth Gun, and Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil for discussion on our next episode, and our selected title is The Sixth Gun, Vol. 1 & 2.

Our hosts for this episode are Tobiah Panshin, Joe Preti, John Waits, and Adam Panshin. A special thank you John, who you can hear every week on Arc Reactions. This week Tobiah sat down with John and Dylan on their show to talk about the Netflix series, Jessica Jones.

Welcome to our new Halloween bonus series, Tales from the Gutter. For the month of October we will be focusing each week on a different genre of horror/spooky comic.

This week we take a look at comics featuring monsters and the things that hunt them. To kick off this discussion, we read Afterlife with Archie by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and art by Francesco Francavilla, October Faction by Steve Niles and Damien Worm, and iZombie by Chris Roberson with art by Mike Allred with colors by Laura Allred.

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The Long Run takes place outside of our normal continuity of episodes, and features table discussion of an entire work or long selection of a series. In this episode of The Long Run we talk about X-Statix, by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred. For this episode we read The X-Statix Omnibus.

Originally called X-Force, this team of reality-show superheroes took over both the name and comic of the original X-Force with issue 116 of that series. After 13 issues the series and team were renamed and relaunched in X-Statix #1, that series lasting for a further 29 issues before cancellation.

Released in 2001, X-Statix sits at the far edge of the Marvel Universe. It came out during a strange, experimental time for Marvel Comics, sharing shelf space with Morrison’s New X-Men and the first wave of Ultimate Marvel comics. It focuses on a team of media-obsessed celebrity mutants who spend more time worrying about their popularity and endorsement deals than they do saving the world.

Vain, petty, and prone to bickering, the X-Statix serve as a cynical and satirical examination of popular media told through the lens of a world populated with superheroes. It also examines many of the tropes that underpin the superhero genre itself, most notably the apparently immunity to death or lasting harm that most heroes seem to enjoy.

On the next Long Run, we will be changing our format slightly. Instead of reading an entire series, we will be reading a selection of comics all featuring a specific character. For episode 8 we will be following the career of Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler (aka Robin [aka Batgirl]), from her initial introduction to the end of the pre-52 DCU. The exact list of issues can be found here.